by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0 The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n The bizarre story of socialist IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was almost storybook: The socialist guardian, now facing sordid sexual-battery charges, we are told, was slumming in a $3,000 per night hotel, with an understanding that he can show up at any time at an Air France flight and hop on a first-class seat. His sense of entitlement \u2014 from violating the law to living like 18th-century French royalty to purportedly having his way with a worker of the lower classes \u2014 was the logical bookend to the IMF\u2019s harsh lectures to Greeks and others to suck it up, cut back, and live according to their means in these times of global recession. (Not to mention the prior exemptions granted by the IMF to the suspect\u2019s past sexual peccadillos.) It is almost as if the more our global experts assure us that equality-of-result central planning works, the more such an egalitarian veneer seems to mask a self-indulgent core.<\/p>\n As we saw with allegations of Al Gore\u2019s having groped hotel masseuses, there seems to be some sort of synergy with global humanitarian elites toiling on our behalf, fancy hotels, exclusive travel \u2014 and sexual aggression against those toiling in the service sector. In some sick way, just as Gore\u2019s mounting hypocrisies came to symbolize the decline in global-warming religious observance, so too Strauss-Kahn\u2019s \u201cindulgences\u201d may be emblematic of the mounting hypocrisies of the IMF.<\/p>\n In any case, Greeks who were thinking of defaulting (and they were legion) were looking for the slightest excuse of any sort, and now they may well have found one, however unlikely: If the head of the IMF overseers cannot follow the law, symbolically reflect in his own life the tough sacrifices asked by others, and abide by protocols of common decency, why then should his indebted subjects?<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0 The Corner The bizarre story of socialist IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was almost storybook:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[508],"tags":[56,149,1066,728,193,729],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Nu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3083,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-teachable-moment-on-american-european-faultlines\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":0},"title":"A Teachable Moment on American-European Faultlines","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The full story is not out on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and he is innocent of forcible sexual battery until proven guilty, but already the case has exposed an ancient abyss between European elite and American popular cultures \u2014 accentuated by the differences between New York\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Public Figures"","block_context":{"text":"Public Figures","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/public-figures\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2552,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/not-so-fast-on-strauss-khan\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":1},"title":"Not So Fast on Strauss-Khan","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 9, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Almost everyone who has written about Strauss-Kahn has, quite correctly, used the adjective \u201callegedly\u201d in relation to the charges against him, which are as yet unproven in a court of law. But most of that earlier critique \u2014 prior to these new, equally unproven\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Public Figures"","block_context":{"text":"Public Figures","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/public-figures\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2752,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/collapse-of-a-rotten-edifice\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":2},"title":"Collapse of a Rotten Edifice","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9649,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9649-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":3},"title":"From an Angry Reader: Hello\u2026","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"From an Angry Reader: Hello Mr Hanson. I read your articles on Townhall.com and have a question on something you wrote in Enemies Of Language. In your article you refer to Nazi Germany as having been \u201cright wing.\u201d This is a question that I have been wanting to pose so\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11384,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americans-wont-vote-for-socialism-once-they-know-what-it-is\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":4},"title":"Americans won’t vote for socialism once they know what it is","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is a piece by one of my colleagues. Paul Roderick Gregory \/\/ The Hill A series of\u00a0polls\u00a0have shown that pluralities of Democrats and millennials prefer socialism to capitalism. These surveys also make clear that respondents do not know what socialism is. Also Sen.\u00a0Bernie Sanders\u00a0(I-Vt.) has shown that Democratic primary\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Socialism"","block_context":{"text":"Socialism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/socialism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11810,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-socialist-is-bernie-sanders\/","url_meta":{"origin":3068,"position":5},"title":"How Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 6, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory published\u00a0by\u00a0Hoover\u00a0Institution The candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination raises the real prospect of an avowed socialist as President of the United States. Notably, Sanders reveals little about what socialism means to him, other than giving many things away\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bernie Sanders"","block_context":{"text":"Bernie Sanders","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bernie-sanders\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3070,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068\/revisions\/3070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}